I hate the library
I hate the library, but I’ve grown to love and miss her like a womb. The shadows of its silence spreads, like heavy tomes of whispered truths whose lies I fail to hear.
The books available in our town were scarce. Millions went to the tourism and sports sectors, and our school always paid the price of the market. Books were often nothing more than picture books of mountains and flowers of the Alps. For a town with over 120 hotels, you’d think the library would exceed the size of twenty toilet stalls. But alas, rich Yoric, I barely went there.
They say taking your child to the library regularly increases the likelihood of them going to college later on life 80-fold. Our mother didn’t take us there too often, but she always read us bedtime stories, so I think it has more to do with having books available, which we did, thanks to her insistence on that pastime. Sometimes, we’d choose for her to read us the names of all the first 2 generations of Pokémon, instead of a good night story, from this poster we had acquired in Thailand. Fucking LMAO.
(This may or may not have inspired the topic of my master thesis, which is an indictment of myself as much as anyone else of that time.)
My hatred for libraries comes from a deep-seated sense of shame and guilt. The shame of not reading enough, of pretending to be an avid reader (and writer), whilst secretly embarrassed at the fact I may have ruined my cognitive abilities by choice, not circumstance and am therefore destined to inevitably become the funniest, yet evidently least knowledgeable person in every reading group I shall therefore attend, lest I face the fact I was never meant to study in the first place. I make up for my insecurity by talking over everyone, my impostor syndrome can be heard from miles away. I only got this far because the shame of being addicted to at least two drugs for half my life has produced a guilt in me that compels me to force my body unto various chairs of libraries and cafes, to pretend to read and believe I write out of necessity, not guilt.
The Lucerne library was under construction when I first moved to the city that would live in me during the years of my decay. When they finally finished construction, it looked like a prison, and I came to peace with my sentence: to spend the remainder of my labor-free days showing off my red-lit eyes in the panopticon of nerds. A nerd, what I am but try desperately to pretend I’m not, but also what I fail to be but desperately believe I am, deep down. I sit down, listening to the most pretentious list I could come up with, and start confessing all my sins on paper, then keyboard, then online.
I have never borrowed a single book from a library, they’re all dull, but I need to own them all. It’s the guilt of having drifted too far from my working-class turned petit bourgeois roots. There’s always been a dreadful feeling present that I’m not meant to have studied. My degree has been in vain, but I’m educated enough to know it. This paradox makes me want to kill myself in thought and prose. But the cowardly man of inaction prevails, and, like many before him, he settles for the church, the temple, the monastery, the camp and the library. The nomadic hermit of precarious work, the home de lettres whose comparison pays great insult to everyone involved. Oh where will he go, but what will he eat?
This library has brought great suffering and confusion to me. I have once again wasted my life here. I should have been preparing a course I’m teaching on Friday likely unsuccessfully. I’m dropping out. But first, I’ll read some more pages of Pessoa, before rolling a joint at the library desk like a child begging for punishment, before I make my way home, where I’ll wallow in regret. I hate the library and pity my writing.
No one wants to be here but we all pretend we do
